Archive for the 'Tagging' Category

On Christmas Eve, we introduced the new Criticker Collections functionality. Smart move… we then spent much of the holidays cleaning up the bugs and problems which users were finding at an alarming pace.

But now that things are working pretty smoothly, it’s time to start highlighting some of the public collections our users have been creating. Public collections are those which anyone can add to, and are moderated by their creator. We’ll start with a fun collection created by Rufflesack — films that are So Bad They’re Good. Rufflesack describes these as “Films that are either unintentionally hilarious, awesome because of their B-movie factor or in any other way lovable despite their lack of quality.”

Troll 2: You know you wanna watch it

One of the best things about Collections is that you can generate PSIs (Probable Score Indicators) and sort by them. And if you think of another terrible-but-hilarious film that’s not yet included, you can add it directly from the collection’s page. But Rufflesack’s got a pretty good start going in this collection, including Manos: The Hands of Fate, and Delta Force 2.

Since we introduced the ability to tag films, users have been coming up with a huge amount of creative ways to tie films together. One of our favorite recent tags has to be Roger Ebert: Your Movie Sucks, created by Shmendrek.

He describes it as “taken from a collection of Roger Ebert’s one star reviews of terrible films. The bulk of the titles come from the last decade”. And it’s extremely fun to browse through the entries.

I’ve seen a lot of the films in this collection, which perhaps means I don’t listen much to Roger Ebert. But, largely I agree with him… there’s only one film here that I’ve given a good ranking to: Constantine.

What about everyone else? Where do you and Robert disagree, if at all?

It’s been just over a week, since Criticker went live with tagging, and the response has been staggering. Over 300 tags have been created by our rabid users, with over 5500 films tagged.

So, it’s time to introduce another recurring feature at the Criticker Blog, in which we highlight specific tags that warrant your attention. First up: the Criterion Collection. Some good souls have tagged every film included in the Criterion Collection, meaning that the list can now be browsed & sorted on PSI.

Criterion.com

The Criterion Collection is “a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films on DVD”, and thanks to the high caliber of the DVDs and excellent selections, has become shorthand for “quality” among cinephiles. A couple things I immediately notice browsing the list of over 450 films: they’re all classics, and I haven’t seen nearly enough of them yet.

This is just one of the astounding ways our users have been utilizing tagging. We are not afraid to say that this is one of those features that is fundamentally improving the experience of using Criticker. A thousand thanks go out to everyone who has contributed!